If the investment in digital technology and gaming in schools is going to continue to grow, it is up to game developers and companies to do a better job sharing information about what games work and for what kind of learners. That was the message from the deputy director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who oversees investment in what the foundation dubs the next generation of K-12 education in the U.S. last week.

Stacey Childress said the coming five years represented a real opportunity for digital content developers, but only if they change the way they currently operate.

The Shift to Digital in Education

She said that schools and states were going to look to reallocate some of the $9 billion spent on all textbooks and teaching tools, moving away from more traditional print resources to more flexible and potentially powerful digital assets. But she said that shift will only continue if those creating the games honestly share data about when their tools work and when they don’t.

“Whether you are a for-profit or a non-profit, if you don’t have good information that is valid that you will make transparent about which learners your product will work for or will not be so great for, I think we are likely to stall out at some point, this boom we have going on in edtech, because why wouldn’t we use the same stuff we have always used,” Childress told attendees at the 10th annual Games for Change festival in New York.

“I think it is on… the edtech community at large to take seriously high quality information, transparency, honesty, and a non-proprietary approach to spreading information like that,” she added.

According to Childress, the Gates Foundation is in the midst of a “multi-million-dollar” effort to reinvent education from the ground up and she sees gaming as playing a potentially major role in that change.

She added that if games were going to take on a central role in education then advocates should establish rigorous standards for judging the effectiveness of these new technologies in shaping student performance.

But that means the market must change some of its current structure and open itself up more, something she admitted will not be easy for the industry to accept.

“There are tons of incentives in the market for information to stay locked up inside proprietary silos, for big players that have enormous long-term contracts with states and large districts to keep that information as close to the vest as possible. Look, they’re not bad people, the market rewards that right now,” she said.

Assessing What Is Known about Games and Learning

As part of this effort to make information about the industry more transparent, Childress announced the publication of two new research reports focused on assessing what is known and not known about gaming and learning.

Childress said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored a “meta-analysis” of all the research done between 2000 and 2012 that touched on games and learning. Of the nearly 60,000 pieces of research that fit the bill, she said only about 700 of those undertook some experimental effort to formally test the effects and only 77 of the research papers had a methodology that either had a control group or a pre- and post-test to clearly tested the effects of games on the student.

The report, which will be released in greater detail in the coming months, stressed the importance of how games are designed when it comes to how effective they can be for students.

“Much of the debate about digital games for learning to date has focused on more simple questions about whether games are good or bad for learning,” the report’s authors conclude in their phase one summary. “The findings of this meta-analysis demonstrate that the efficacy of digital games for learning depends on their design.”

Childress said although the research raised many questions for future study, it did find that students in the control group could have seen their scores increase 12 percent if they had been exposed to learning games during their lessons.

That news brought applause from the crowd of serious game developers gathered in New York for the three-day conference.

“Isn’t it nice to know that,” Childress said. “We’ve all been saying this stuff like that for a while” but now it can be statistically backed up. The report, from the independent research institute SRI, found that none of the studies demonstrated that inclusion of games hurt learning outcomes. All students did better to some extent.

But the research also highlighted surprising gaps in what is known about the effects of games and what is sometimes widely claimed.

Childress said the research has largely focused on students’ ability to develop cognitive skills and remember content, an area she said is often not the focus of claims about what games can help teach.

SRI’s researchers found only 1 percent of the experimental research done on games had tested whether they could help students develop skills like communication, problem-solving and working in teams – what the SRI team called “interpersonal competencies.” The summary concludes that games’ impact on this area “are less clear due to low numbers of studies focusing on these outcomes.”

Childress said advocates have often stressed those interpersonal skills when talking about the power of gaming, but that those advocates should be cautious until this gap in research is filled by credible studies.

“We have got to get serious research going with the appropriate kind of measures … about these claims we are making about communication, collaboration – these sort of 21st century skills stuff. It’s a great hypothesis. It seems like it would hold. We do not, at this point, because of the tiny number of studies that reach a high enough research bar, actually have the evidence to make those claims,” she said.

She added that it was these same interpersonal skills that are the key to future success and if gaming is to be seriously considered part of the educational method to teach these inter- and intrapersonal skills, they must be studied.

If gaming is to play a more central role in education in the future, it must be able to back up its claims with solid research, saying in education, “The bar for what passes for legit is pretty darn high and … it should be high.”

But the research did provide evidence that gaming is effective in helping students with so-called cognitive learning, the traditional recalling of facts and theories, a result that Childress said should hearten those working on educational games.

She stressed that the foundation continues to see games as a natural tool for education, that their very structure makes them ideal, saying, “The fact that a game has, as one of its key components, a set of rules for engagement that a learner has to sort of figure out how to follow; it has goals that a learner has to reach to keep moving through the game; and then a way of capturing and displaying a learner’s progress through those. I mean, those are just great components of any good learning environment, so the fact that they are a natural part of any good games design makes them an interesting part of a digital tools environment.”

The key now, she said, is to help teachers, parents and others more easily unlock that power for students.

 

Related:

• Research on Assessment in Games (GlassLab-Research), SRI International
• “Can Digital Games Boost Students’ Test Scores?” by Tina Barseghian, MindShift

Lee Banville is the editorial director of the soon-to-launch gamesandlearning.org, a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council. Watch for more in-depth coverage of the games and learning field here, and on gamesandlearning,org, launching in Fall 2013.

On Wednesday, a panel of education professionals, teachers, and tech-savvy students took the stage for the final day of the 10th annual Games for Change Festival held at New World Stages in New York City. Moderated by Forbes blogger, Jordan Shapiro, the panel participants discussed their experience with the National STEM Video Game Challenge, a national program founded by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media that encourages youth in grades 5-12 to create playable video games that utilize STEM-related skills such as creative problem solving and systems-based learning.

Panelists included:

• Brian Alspach – E-Line Media
• Barry Joseph – American Museum of Natural History
• Christa Avampato – Joan Ganz Cooney Center
• Sean Nadel – The Science and Medicine Middle School 366 (Canarsie, Brooklyn)
• Julia Weingaertner – Rising sophomore at Stuart Country Day School (Princeton, NJ)
• Alexander Forrester – graduating senior at Benjamin Banneker Academy for Community Development (Brooklyn)

At the start of the panel, Jordan asked Brian, Barry, and Christa to discuss the set-up of the STEM Challenge as well as its history and mission. The trio explained that the goal of the Challenge is to empower young people to take an idea through the development process to produce a finished product that can be shared with and enjoyed by others. Now in its third year, the Challenge is about to announce its 2013 winners. Brian and Christa both attested to the increased complexity and intricacy of the game designs created by the youth who entered the Challenge this year as compared to the previous two years. Part of that is due to the ever-more sophisticated tools hitting the market and to the enhanced design and coding skills that students are acquiring at a young age through their schools, after-school programs, and on their own.

After hearing from the education professionals, Jordan turned his attention to Sean Nadel, a New York City public school teacher who current teaches middle school Latin, Robotics, and Game Design. Sean spoke about the importance of reaching each individual student with curricula that teach them common core skills in innovative ways.

“I have students who have difficulty writing traditional book reports and essays. However, when I ask them to write about a game they’ve designed or a robotics project they’re working on, the words just flow without any problem. They realize that they are capable writers. My job is to help them discover that they can succeed when they work on projects and materials that interest them,” said Sean.

This panel on the STEM Challenge was unique because it allowed young people the chance to express their personal experiences with games as learning tools. Julia demoed her winning game from the 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge. She and her classmate created a video game that helps very young children learn the concept of math inequalities (greater than / less than). They based the game on the way their teachers taught them to master inequalities and then they made a colorful, interactive game that would entertain and teach young children.

“It was a great experience,” said Julia. “When you first create code, there is always something that’s not quite right and you have to go through line by line to identify the problems and find different ways to solve each one. I didn’t like this class at first, but now I really like writing code. I’m signed up to take a computer programming class next year at my school.”

After Julia spoke specifically about her game, Alex shared his experience as a Youth Leader with Global Kids, an organization that “ensures that urban youth have the knowledge, skills, experiences and values they need to succeed in school, participate effectively in the democratic process, and achieve leadership in their communities and on the global stage.” Alex learned and then taught game design to other New York City youth through a series of workshops sponsored by the Challenge and hosted by a variety of institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History that belong to Mozilla’s Hive New York.

“I didn’t know anything about game design when I started the program. I wasn’t even a big gamer myself. But we had good instructors who taught us game design principles, Gamestar Mechanic (a platform created by E-Line Media), and then taught us how to teach game design. We had to learn all of this content very quickly so that we could teach it to other kids,” said Alex.

He went on to talk about the confidence it gave him to be a teacher and to see other kids learning from him.

“I never thought of myself as someone who could do something like this. I was kind of shy. Now I can pitch game concepts to other people and teach people how to pitch their own game idea.”

The panel wrapped up with Jordan asking where the STEM Challenge is headed. In 2014, the Challenge will focus its efforts on boosting mentorship materials for teachers, parents, and after-school programs, further engaging the teacher community, and increasing access to more youth across the country. Details about the 2014 Challenge will be available later this year at http://stemchallenge.org.

 

According to a September 2012 report completed by Intentional Futures in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 7,000 students drop out of school each day in the United States. And while 95% of low income eighth graders say that they will go to college, only 70% of low income students actually graduate from high school.  Most astounding, however, is that only 8% of low income students in the U.S. earn a bachelor’s degree.

These numbers are truly unacceptable.  Not only is it a moral obligation to lower the dropout rate and increase the number of students ready to succeed in college, but it is also economically beneficial.  Education is the key to help low income students and their families break away from the poverty cycle.

However, addressing the numerous causes of student disengagement is challenging.  While the world has changed and transformed in the past 100 years, education has not.  The classrooms of today look a lot like the classrooms of 100 years ago.  Yet, if one looks closely, a disruption is happening.  Education, worldwide, is changing.  There is a growing number of people who are looking at unique ways to keep students more engaged and increase their learning potential.  Just take a look at Sugata Mitra’s 2013 Ted Prize winning lecture and you’ll see just how big and bold the innovative ideas for the future of education truly are!

One such way of increasing student engagement is through personal learning models, particularly through game-based learning and assessments. Scholars around the country are looking at ways that video games can be used in the classroom to facilitate learning as well as assess what students have learned.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has chosen to invest in the Games, Learning, and Assessment (GLA) field with an emphasis on innovative tools that support teachers and help students.

The grantees were selected by the Gates Foundation because they met five design requirements.  They all assess the application of Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, assess complex skills, engage students, provide immediate feedback, and provide a breadth of data analytics.  The goal is to master high engagement with a high cognitive demand.  Most importantly, all the games are playful!

A few of the GLA grantees met early last month in New York to share ideas, discuss challenges, and explore solutions around their work in game-based assessments.  Some around the table have been involved in this quickly evolving field from its very early days in the 1980s.  They noted that while the focus was once on developing educational games for the sake of developing games, it has now evolved into the idea of developing games as tools for assessments.

After receiving some historical context and reflecting on where the games and assessments field is today, each grantee presented their projects.  As they each addressed the challenges they faced along the way in their development process, their colleagues voiced agreement.

Each participant encountered similar challenges, yet had been unaware that others were struggling with the same issues.  The participants expressed the need to share not only their findings, but also the challenges they faced along the development process with each other.  Many felt that they have been working in isolation and realized that they are reinventing approaches.  They also discussed ideas on how to create bridges, e.g. – sharing algorithms and methods, and explored the idea of convening practical workshops to bring group learning.

One of the top concerns the participants had in terms of game development was gaining a better understanding how games are used in the classroom, by finding schools and teachers who are willing to participate in the research process, as well as finding ways to align assessment and game mechanics to maximize engagement for kids and ease of use for teachers.

Another challenge that was repeatedly discussed was creating games that do not hide the “academics,” yet still produce an engaging experience for students of various subjects.  Failure within a game is considered to be part of the learning process, but at what point does a struggle cause frustration?  As Zoran Popović noted in his presentation, no single theory can be applied to everything, which is why data is so crucial.  Games can serve for massive data gathering within learning pathways.  This data should then be used to optimize for engagement and mastery.

Ultimately, each team wants their game to be marketable.  Given the current operational model, this dream is often too far out of reach: Developers receive funding for specific deliverables for a certain period of time, and then in order to continue the project, must go out and search for funds again.  This back and forth thwarts a good game from becoming a great game.  As Gene Koo of iCivics explains in this recent blog post, the participants proposed an alternative model that may help learning games truly take off.

To this end, the Games and Learning Publishing Council, a Cooney Center project funded by the Gates Foundation, is investigating ways to increase investment in learning games.  Through the forthcoming resource site gamesandlearning.org (launching this fall), we hope to bring together researchers, developers and investors and facilitate a dialogue on effective ways to bring projects such as iCivics, Radix and Refraction to scale.

Through a rise of interest and investment in digital games based learning and assessment, we hope that this form of personalized learning will increase student engagement, keep them from dropping out of school and prepare them to succeed in college and the real world.

On Tuesday, June 4, the Center on Media and Human Development Northwestern University released Parenting in a Digital Age: A National Survey.* Alexis Lauricella, one of the report’s co-authors, shares some of the findings here.

The world of parenting has changed.  In 1980, parents had home phones without answering machines, televisions without remote controls, cars without screens, and maybe if they had older children they owned an Atari video game console. Today, toddlers tell parents to “google it” when they can’t answer one of their million “why” questions, there are 24-hour cable channels created just for infants and toddlers, video game systems that read your body movements, and people carry mini-computers (smartphones) in their pockets that allow them to call friends, email co-workers, search the Internet, and download age-appropriate games for their child to play on the go.  The technological boom has impacted us all, but how has it influenced parents?  This was the main question behind the nationally representative survey of over 2300 parents of children under age 8. In a report titled Parenting in the Age of Digital Technology, which was released on June 4, 2013 in Washington, DC, we examined the details and intricacies of parenting young children in an age in which technology and media are increasingly mobile, accessible, and constantly available.

This survey recognized that children spend substantial amounts of time with media including television, computers, and mobile devices and rather than focusing solely on child screen time, this survey sought to understand the role of the parents in creating the home media environment in which children are being raised today.

Three main findings from this study:

1. In contrast to the popular press image that mobile technology is the new pacifier used to calm and quiet down children, our survey shows that parents today have a range of tools at their disposal and other tools are used more often than mobile technologies.  Parents are more likely to use toys or activities (87%), books (79%), and TV (77%) when they need to keep children occupied than mobile media devices like smartphones or iPads (37% among those who have one).
2. Parents have encyclopedias full of information at their fingertips, storybooks on their kindles, and a selection of games in their pocket, yet for most parents media is not their number one concern, it is not something that they often have family conflict about, and most parents say new mobile devices do not make parenting easier. Fewer parents were concerned with the impact of media on their children especially compared to more global issues like health, nutrition, and social emotional skills.  Most parents (70%) say smartphones and tablets do not make parenting easier.  Also, media use does not cause family conflicts.
3. Yes, young children spend considerable amounts of time with screen media (see Common Sense Media, 2011), but so do their parents.  And it seems that parents of young children may be setting the stage for the home media environment that their young children will grow up in. About 27% of families were “media centric“ families.  These families have parents who themselves consume an average of 11 hours of screen media a day.  Most of these parents (81%) say they are “very” or “somewhat” likely to use TV to keep their child occupied when they need to get something done at home.  Many children in these families (48%) have TVs in their bedroom and children spend an average of almost 4.5 hours with screen media per day.  In contrast, “media light” families consist of parents who spend less than 2 hours per day with screen media.  These families are less likely to enjoy watching TV or movies together as a family “a lot” and are less likely to use TV when getting their child ready for bed.  Children in these families spend about an hour and a half with media each day.

Yes, the world that parents parent in is different from the one in which they grew up, but the boom in mobile technology has truly become an additional tool in their parenting repertoire not their catchall solution.  This generation of parents grew up with TVs, video game consoles, and some computers. They rely on the Internet, email, and mobile technology to do their work and communicate with others and they themselves are media users.  Thus, their use likely sets the stage for their children’s home media environment.  Parents are different today and with each changing generation, parents have to adapt and adjust to mesh their parenting behaviors and styles with the current environment their children are growing up in. This survey begins to scratch the surface at understanding the ways in which parents parent their young children in a world that is surrounded by digital technology.

 

Alexis R. Lauricella is a Research Associate at the Center on Media and Human Development Northwestern University.  Dr. Lauricella earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and her Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University.  Her research focuses on children’s learning from media and parents’ and teachers’ attitudes toward and use of media with young children. Recent publications include empirical research articles in Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Children and Media, Media Psychology, Merrill Palmer Quarterly and reports for the Fred Rogers Center and the Center on Media and Human Development.  Dr. Lauricella is also the founder of www.PlayLearnParent.com, a website that translates child-development research for parents.

 

*Note: This post was edited on 7/14/2014 to reflect corrections in the data.